I am using a parallel port ZIP drive with my M24. But what I write as follows should match to any XT and using a ZIP drive. So it works. But you have basically two possibilites how to do which depends basically on the ZIP drive you have. This is because there are two firmware versions which are incompatible to each other. There is the 'old' and the 'new' one. Until now we don't know a safe method to differentiate between the two versions of the drive, there is only a soft indicator yet, which has to be evaluated and confirmed by everyone who wants to use a parallel port ZIP drive on XT (like M24) or ... tatataaaaa ... ATARI Portfolio. Yes... The soft indicator is the power supply which was shipped with the drive. There are two very different ones:
- The big power supply at the end of the power cable which plugs directly to the power socket - this one is the 'old' one
- The small power supply somewhere in the middle of the power cable - this one is the 'new' one.
But this is only a soft indicator, not 100% safe, also because the power supplies can be swapped.
Now you have two driver options.
1. The original GUEST.EXE from Iomega.
This one supports both versions of the ZIP 100 drive, 'old' and 'new' one. It also supports the ZIP 250 parallel port drive. If you have the JAZ traveller parport-to-SCSI adapter it even will support SCSI version of ZIP drives and JAZ drive. But there are three disadvantages of the guest driver:
- You need to have at least MS-DOS 5.0 to support the guest driver. Under others this is due to partition size, typically M24 runs DOS 3.20 which can not support 100 MB in one partition
- It officially supports only 80286 processor and better. Luckily an NEC V30 (or V20 for other XT compatible PC) does that job. So you need to swap the processor, if you haven't done that already. I also tested V40 based PC (like some late XT made by Olivetti), it's also fine.
- It takes a lot of memory as it supports a big variety of different iomega drives.
The good thing, as long as you have DOS 5 or better and a V20/V30, guest.exe is easy to use.
2. palmzip (or pofozip specially for Atari Portfolio)
This one only works with the 'old' drive version (big power supply). It works with 8088 and 8086 (no NEC V20/V30/V40 required) and it even works with older DOS versions. But for older DOS versions you need to prepare the ZIP medias to conatain three partions of 32 MB. Palmzip comes with a tool to do so. But on your other PC for data exchange you need to do something to see all three partions, most Windows versions only will see the first partition on the ZIP media. On a newer DOS PC you can use aspippm.sys driver for the parallel poert ZIP drive and use ASPIDISK.SYS for the logical drive access, aspidisk.sys (from Adaptec) can be told to reserve 3 partions for swappable medias. Before you can use the palmzip driver reliable you have to experiment with the timing setting of that driver, you can change that in your config.sys when loading the driver. Please refer to palmzip driver website.
-
http://leute.server.de/peichl/palmzipe.htm
There is also a version of palmzip.sys for Atari Portfolio, called pofozip.sys.
-
http://leute.server.de/peichl/pofozipe.htm
Notes:
- Until now I didn't got the iomega ASPIPPM.Sys driver to run on my M24, this could be an alternative to guest.exe, maybe a bit more space saving as this.
- M24 internal harddisk is quite slow compared to ZIP drive... ;-)